How does our personality affect the music we listen to?

This study replicates the findings of a recent study (Chamorro-Premuzic, Gomà-i-Freixanet, Furnham, & Muro, 2009) on the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and everyday uses of music or people’s motives for listening to music. In addition, it examined emotional intelligence as predictor of uses of music, and whether uses of music and personality traits predicted liking of music consensually classified as sad, happy, complex, or social. A total of 100 participants rated their preferences for 20 unfamiliar musical extracts that were played for a 30-s interval on a website and completed a measure of the Big Five personality traits. Openness predicted liking for complex music, and Extraversion predicted liking for happy music. Background use of music predicted preference for social and happy music, whereas emotional music use predicted preference for sad music. Finally, males tended to like sad music and use music for cognitive purposes more than females did.

Source: Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas, Fagan, Patrick and Furnham, Adrian (2010) Personality and uses of music as predictors of preferences for music consensually classified as happy, sad, complex, and social. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4 (4), pp. 205-213.